The Garden Kitchen Lab is a backyard-to-table educational program for underserved communities. Our mission is to give youth and their families access to healthy and locally grown food through starting and sustaining food-producing gardens. This hands-on multi-disciplinary program puts the power in the hands of community citizens, so they understand the link between food production, the environment and their health, and take ownership of their nutrition.

Category Archives: digital

Garden Kitchen Lab is developing a new series of projects called “Media With A Purpose”; which aims at using technology as a vehicle to learn about sustainability and other cultures through food and cooking.

Thank you Media Coordinators Chad Chenali and Belinda McKeever for collaborating with me on this project!

Great class! Students harvested basil, took the leaves and flowers off the stems and helped add it the blender. Mixed it with walnuts, olive oil and a bit of salt. Presto! Pesto sauce was mixed with organic pasta and cherry tomatoes also from the garden. In general the kids love this program and what they make, but it is inevitable they like some recipes more than others. They loved the taste of basil! Raw and as pesto. As usual children walk away with a copy of recipe and complete a quiz of what they did in each class.

Today students learned how to prepare a quinoa salad. Quinoa, a grain g found in the high altitudes of Peru and Bolivia is a great source of fiber. Kids harvested cucumbers, tomatoes, chives and basil leaves and flowers to add to the salad. After some chopping and shredding they completed their quiz on what to harvest and how to prepare a quinoa salad, as well as the nutritional value of all the vegetables we included today. A brief lesson on mapping the location of Peru and Bolivia and learning who grows quinoa was also included.

The garden tells us ‘what’s cooking’. Literally. This week beets were what the garden was giving and it only made sense to prepare something sweet and cold for this hot summer weather. Kids learned how to make beet-banana-smoothies. Easy and a great energy booster!

Students completed their first full Garden-Kitchen-Lab lesson today by harvesting twelve super big broccolis! The children took all broccolis to the kitchen, chopped the stems and leaves off and added them to a large pan of steamed water. Three minutes later, the kids were enjoying steamed broccoli with olive oil and salt. All twelve broccolis were eaten that morning! the kids completed a quiz about the growing, harvesting and preparing the recipe along with learning the benefits of eating broccoli. A successful lesson.

This year’s growing season started by adding two additional beds to the garden and showing kids how to start a raised bed form scratch. They laid plastic, poked holes for drainage and added layers of organic potting soil and compost for a good grow. Some of the compost added came from our own compost bin which we started last year. After school kids learned to plant from seeds, learned how to transplant seedlings and how to feed the garden a mix of organic vegetable food. After eight weeks students were able to see the progress, harvesting twelve lettuces, eight beets and ten broccolis! By the end of the spring they were quizzed to asses how much had the children absorbed from the lessons.